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RadeonHD 1.2.4 Driver Released

Phoronix: RadeonHD 1.2.4 Driver Released

While the Novell developers responsible for the xf86-video-radeonhd driver have been busy working on OpenSuSE 11.1, we have managed to get a new driver point release before the end of the year. Matthias Hopf has this morning announced the availability of the RadeonHD 1.2.4 driver. Added since the RadeonHD 1.2.3 driver in October is HDMI audio support, support for the ATI RV710 and RV730 GPUs using DCE 3.2, rotation support, RandR 1.3 panning, and many acceleration and build fixes...

What is the state of RS780 (HD3200 exactly) in radeonhd?
Is it still better to use "radeon" driver or AMD catalyst drivers?

that's like asking if it's better to ride a donkey or an ostrich. oh, if you are able to ride one of them, please go directly to the AMD legal department,get all the documentation and publish it on the net. if you wait for them, you'll have to wait that new card series comes out in the market...there is no legal issue about that doc, it's all about business. they are just waiting their cards (2xx series and 3x series) get old. what liars holy sh%$.

The package covers both 6xx (HD2xxx, HD3xxx) and 7xx (HD4xxx) so waiting for the 2xx and 3xx series to get old wouldn't help.

I guess we could have limited the package to only cover 6xx and been able to release a bit sooner but I didn't think that was the right choice. We ended up having to do a lot of the initial bring-up work on 7xx anyways, so cutting back to 6xx-only seemed kinda counter-productive.

EDIT - just noticed Michael was actually talking about "3D stack next year". That's probably right, not because of IP issues or anything, just that the 3D support is a *big* task. My SWAG estimates were a total of 28 developer-months to bring 6xx/7xx 3D up to the same level as 5xx, and that the equivalent of 18 developer-months of work had been done, either from Matthias/Alex/Richard writing code and working out problems or from internal code we were able to leverage. Adding 5xx 3D support was a much smaller task by comparison since the 5xx is a lot like a 3xx/4xx other than the actual shader instructions - the big fixed-function blocks like VAP didn't change much. Going to 6xx every block except the command processor is totally different.

The first code we push will be :

- basic EXA acceleration,
- Xv (hopefully with the colour-space-conversion shader working; everything is kinda purple without it ),
- DRM
- a demo program which shows how to make a 6xx or 7xx perform the major 3D functions.

With luck there will be a ~190 page register spec doc to go with the code.

Serious question for you. Do you really think the time for 6xx/7xx has been unreasonably long ? We finished fixing up the 5xx documentation in April and the 3D driver work took until ~July, so that was maybe 7 months from start to finish. I think the 6xx/7xx will end up taking a couple of months longer than 5xx did, and the complexity is maybe 3 times as high.

I had definitely hoped that tcore would let us "shortcut" the documentation process and get something out early, but that didn't work out. Once we put together all the pieces we needed to show how to write a 3d driver (tcore, tgl and a bunch of other test programs) the resulting package was bigger than the finished driver would have been, and a lot harder to get through IP review.

Talking about tcore was a mistake. That's the last time I talk about something in public without doing a line-by-line inspection first

well, I will actually explain better. I'm not really disappointed for the doc releasing time, but from the beginning. till last year, fglrx driver was a real total crap, and you know this better than me. then amd finally released a better driver and opengl performance improved a lot. but there were(and still are) a lot of issues. then amd started releasing doc. but as of today fglrx is far from perfect, doc is incomplete. so in other words I am disappointed for all this put together.

"That's the last time I talk about something in public without doing a line-by-line inspection first "

I appreciate your detail post and suggest to don't do it again people just want to know when their card will work out of the box maybe I want to know more than a general user because I ask myself a lot of questions, but you said enough and it's fine like this